You're done gorging on turkey, which means only one thing: 'Tis the season to be stuffed with Oscar punditry. Movieline's Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics has awoken from its L-Tryptophan slumber to provide you with our latest Oscar Index, which evaluates the contenders for Best Director. The latest Index on Best Picture can be found here, and over the course of the next week, we'll be weighing in on the Best Actor, Actress and Support Actor and Actress races. more »

As you may have heard or read, the 2012 Academy Award nominations have stirred strong reactions in certain pockets of the Oscar snubculture. And you just know that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close filmmaker Stephen Daldry -- a first-time non-nominee for Best Director -- is seething somewhere out there: "But at least two of those guys won't even show up!" Fair enough! Or is it?more »

Backstage at the Spirit Awards Saturday afternoon, Darren Aronofsky was in a jaunty mood. And why not? With Black Swan's two biggest Oscar rivals, The Social Network and The King's Speech, absent from competition at the penultimate awards show of the year (TSN excluded by budget, TKS relegated to the foreign film category), the night belonged to Aronofsky's stylish psychological ballet thriller. So after Black Swantook home Best Cinematography (Matthew Libatique), Best Actress (Natalie Portman), Best Director, and Best Feature, Aronofsky took to the winners' room to have some fun with the press.

It used to be you could count on David O. Russell to be Hollywood's resident actor-alienating, on-set yelling enfant terrible. Not anymore. As the director told MSN Movies, he's well aware that years of bad behavior landed him in movie jail. And now that The Fighter has put him back in the industry's good graces with a Best Director Oscar nod as the cherry on top, Russell's all about making nice.